Further adventures in two-manning Sunwell

Guess what we did! (Epic Kil'jaeden screenshot courtesy of Alieth.)

(Two-manning? Well, sort of. Some bosses took three characters. There’s still only the two of us, though.)

Last we’d done anything in Sunwell was back in February, when we killed Kalecgos. Then we’d taken a few shots at Brutallus, got stomped into the ground and went back home with our tail between our legs.

Earlier today, we were discussing what else we could go kill when it was occurred to us that we hadn’t tried Sunwell for a while. Having seen the Hunter solos Brutallus YouTube video, we figured that although it was very doubtful that my hunter could pull 30k+ DPS by herself – well, her pet could tank, and Alieth could help DPS as enhancement, so we might be able to kill him.

So I respecced my secondary spec (which is used as “whatever spec we need to kill whatever it is we’re killing”) from Beast Mastery to Marksmanship (largely because of the healing from Chimera Shot; the spec I used was 7/31/3 – I just picked what I hoped would help me and my pet stay alive while outputting decent DPS), and off we went on our merry way.

Kalecgos was uneventful; we knew we could kill him, we killed him fine, nothing to comment on there. He really can be done with any 3 people, as long as all three can stay alive while having their face beaten in by bosses.

Brutallus was… uneventful as well all considered. We stuck my druid in a corner to just stand there and look pretty (had our hands full controlling one character each and doing decent DPS), got my valiant pet turtle in front of Brutallus with Camouflage and pulled. We had one wipe very early on in the fight, because I’d forgotten to take the turtle’s cooldowns off autocast and I didn’t have an easy indicator of when Brutallus would Stomp the poor thing… so splat went the turtle, and splat went the rest of us.

And then we pulled him again, and the turtle stayed alive, and with our combined 28k+ DPS we were well ahead of the berserk timer, even with Alieth spending Maelstrom Weapon procs to help heal the turtle. No flasks or consumables needed.

Felmyst was… less uneventful. We had to contend with air phases; we deliberately pulled her once and got my druid killed, then left her dead on the floor to avoid risking mind controls messing us up. We had two wipes – one in which I got mind controlled during the second air phase (was a tad too slow moving out of the breath), one in which I tried pressing my engineering belt to get away from a breath faster and, as engineering is wont to do, it backfired in a spectacular fashion. Then we pulled her the third time and killed her – nothing really to be noted except “don’t fail at air phases”; we needed two air phases before we got her down.

Eredar Twins were a bit of a pain. We had a couple of failed pulls before we settled on a strategy of having Alieth as restoration keeping us both alive and me tanking both Alythess and Sacrolash with my pet. We killed Sacrolash first and just did our best to survive (Alieth spent half the time stunned or conflagged). The druid stayed sat in the corner as usual. We did about 12k DPS combined and just barely made it before the berserk timer:

M’uru… oh M’uru. We spent the better part of the evening bashing our head against M’uru. We tried with my main tanking and Alieth healing, with my hunter tanking and Alieth healing, with my main tanking and Alieth DPSing, with my hunter tanking and Alieth DPSing… splat, splat, splat, splattity splat splat. Splat. Did I mention “splat”?

After a brief interruption to eat some pizza for dinner, we switched things around. Since I really didn’t want anything dropped by M’uru (or by Kil’jaeden, for that matter) on my druid, I figured I could bring my discipline priest healer instead: that would give us an easier way of dealing with Dark Fiends (one single Mass Dispel, as opposed to Alieth desperately spamming Purge) and more consistent healing. Not to mention I could Fade to avoid getting too many adds gnawing on my face.

How not to do M'uru, part 2: slight progress. (The first time we got to Entropius... just before dying horribly.)

Alieth was controlling both his shaman and my hunter; I was on my priest full time. I specced into 2/2 Veiled Shadowsandglyphed Fade, so Fade ended up with a 15sec cooldown and I only spent 5 seconds every 15 not Faded. It helped a lot (as did the large PowerAura informing me that my 5 seconds of pain were up and I could Fade again).

We did run into the one bug…

Why yes, that is a screenshot of both M'uru and Entropius up simultaneously. Your guess is as good as mine.

We were just recovering from a wipe, and for some reason, when M’uru respawned, Entropius spawned with him. Entropius was doing his zappy thing and hitting the lot of us, but we weren’t in combat with him at all. When we did pull him, both of them were doing their thing, so we were dealing with both phase 1 and phase 2 of the encounter at the same time. It was kind of surreal and very, very painful. Fortunately, it didn’t last – after we wiped, he respawned normally.

The way we ultimately ended up succeeding at a kill was just burning M’uru as fast as we could and mostly ignoring the adds, except for picking them up with the hunter’s pet so they wouldn’t nom my face off. The hunter was reglyphed for better burst (out went Kill Shot and Arcane Shot, in went Steady Shot and Rapid Fire), I burned Power Infusion on myself and chain-Smited, Alieth-the-shaman popped Bloodlust and dropped a Fire Elemental immediately and an Earth Elemental when the first set of adds came, and we just burned the bastard down (with me Mass Dispelling each set of Dark Fiends). And then when phase 2 came we just did our best to survive and scramble around; at the end I was desperately out of mana, with every single mana-regenning cooldown used (multiple times, obviously, I started pushing regen cooldowns early on), so I whimpered “I’m so very very out of mana” or something to that extent and Alieth switched to his shaman and heal-bombed the hell out of us. (He’d like me to mention that the only reason he even managed is that he had Spiritwalker’s Grace, because we kept getting bounced around by Singularities.)

Oh god finally. By the time we killed him, some of my mana cooldowns had come back up so I was no longer quite so desperately OOM. Also note my very pro "HEY FADE IS UP YOU DUMMY" PowerAura.

When the dust settled, he was dead and we were alive.

Kil’jaeden was almost a disappointment in comparison – we one-shot him, it was just a matter of endurance and healing through the damage he does (Alieth had to help out again, since between me getting a touch Smite-happy and the mana-draining black lightning I ran myself semi-dry again).

The best part? For a change, the loot gods were kind. (Don’t talk to me about Illidan’s damn blindfold that still won’t bloody drop aaaaaaargh.) Out of this clear we got the last Tier 6 pieces I was missing for my main, the last Tier 6 pieces Alieth was missing for his shaman, and…

Yeah. I don’t normally swear, but for this I ended up making an instinctive exception.

Me: (loots) “Holy shit, Thori’dal.”
Alieth: “Huh?” (looks) “Wow.”

Happy, happy hunter me. :D

Now the whole point of this was to see if we could clear Sunwell, so we could farm for Thori’dal for my hunter and for pretty gear for both of us. Getting Thori’dal won’t stop us from redoing this, especially since it’s pretty good gold all considered and it’s fun as hell; I’ll probably end up bringing my paladin next time we clear this, at least for pre-M’uru bosses – since my druid doesn’t really want anything else (her bank is full as it is) and my paladin could use a certain pretty shield, among other things.